On August 19, 2026, I transmitted a separate supplemental submission to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance concerning Lithuania’s official treatment of Kazys Škirpa. It is the fourth document in the same submission sequence that began with my May 28 petition: the original petition, the June 3 procedural supplement, the Brazaitis evidentiary submission transmitted earlier on August 19, and now the Škirpa submission.[1]

The Škirpa submission was transmitted at 4:10:32 p.m. Pacific time, after the separate Brazaitis submission had been transmitted at 11:09:18 a.m. Pacific. The two August 19 documents are companion supplements to the same May 28 petition. They are not new petitions, and they were deliberately transmitted separately because the underlying documentary records are different.[2]

The title of the new submission is The Škirpa Determination: Undisclosed Favorable Premises, an Unremedied Transparency Finding, Differential Attribution, and Persistence After Ministerial Correction. Its central question is narrower than the historical controversy that surrounds Škirpa: whether the reasoning and correction practice of an IHRA Member Country’s state historical institution falls within the Alliance’s own standards on Holocaust denial and distortion, rehabilitation, research, archival access, and accurate treatment of the historical record.[3]

On August 20, in response to my earlier request for procedural clarification, IHRA Secretary General Michaela Küchler confirmed receipt and stated that “there is no process for external submission of petitions.” She added that the chairs of IHRA’s working groups and committees are responsible for setting their agendas. I therefore do not claim that IHRA has docketed, accepted, or opened formal proceedings on these materials. The record has nevertheless been transmitted to the Secretariat, national delegations, and relevant IHRA recipients and placed in the public record. (Michaela Küchler, email to the author, 20 Aug. 2026.)

What the submission does not ask IHRA to decide

The submission does not ask IHRA to determine Škirpa’s criminal guilt. It does not claim that he directed or participated in killings in Lithuania while he remained in Berlin. It does not claim that he personally drafted every antisemitic text issued by the Lithuanian Activist Front. It does not ask the Alliance to decide whether a street should bear his name or whether a plaque should be installed.

Those limits matter. The submission is about institutional historical method. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre issued a favorable historical certificate concerning Škirpa in 2015. That certificate was not a document of simple concealment: it acknowledged antisemitic manifestations within the Berlin Front, quoted anti-Jewish material, and stated that antisemitism within the organization had been raised to a political level and may have encouraged some Lithuanians to become involved in the Holocaust. It then bounded the significance of that material through the distinction between expulsion and extermination, the absence of prewar knowledge of a plan of total extermination, and Škirpa’s physical absence from the killing sites.[4]

A historian may agree or disagree with that weighting. By itself, that would be an ordinary scholarly dispute. The reason this record was placed before IHRA’s Secretariat and national delegations is what happened around the published conclusion.

The favorable reasoning that was not published

In February 2018, the Centre disclosed that it had taken additional favorable considerations into account when reaching its Škirpa conclusion even though those considerations did not appear in the published finding. The examples it identified were the supposed complete American exoneration of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis and the fact that Škirpa had lived for roughly three decades in the United States without being accused by American authorities.[5]

Lithuania’s own Seimas Ombudsman recorded the same acknowledgment and found that the Centre had failed to observe the........

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